What are tags and why should I use them?

A tag works like a simple label. Tags provide additional information about a post, and are helpful in grouping similar posts together into flexible classifications. They don't have to adhere to any predefined categories—they are uniquely applied by users. Because an individual's tags are shared across the entire community, adding tags to content helps to build an informal but effective classification system (sometimes called a "Folksonomy").

While browsing PeerSource, you'll see that tags are displayed in a "tag cloud," in which the font size of a tag reflects the number of posts to which that tag has been applied. This helps users to visualize the distribution of content across the site. If you're reading a discussion thread or accessing a resource and you'd like to find related content, try clicking on tags that other users have applied to the page you're on, and see what turns up!

You might tag a post, simply as a reminder to yourself, or as a helpful way to group posts together later. When your tags are combined with those from the rest of the community, they make content easier to browse, and add helpful keywords to improve search results.

It is a good practice to add a few relevant tags when making a new post. This will make your post more visible to other users browsing related content.